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The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

Louise Glück

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Louise Glück
Enough
Life
Sharp
Advantage
Poetry
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Last
May

More quotes by Louise Glück

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I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness—
Louise Glück
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Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
Louise Glück
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What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
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Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
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Intense love always leads to mourning.
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At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
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Like a child, the earth's going to sleep, or so the story goes. But I'm not tired, it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired
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At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
Louise Glück
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The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
Louise Glück
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He takes her in his arms He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you But he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end You're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.
Louise Glück
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Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Louise Glück
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The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
Louise Glück
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The love of form is a love of endings.
Louise Glück
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I pretended indifference…even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.
Louise Glück
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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Glück
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As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change.
Louise Glück
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I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
Louise Glück
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To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
Louise Glück
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I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
Louise Glück